Posts Tagged ‘Analog Devices’

Last Thursday, the organizer of the Ted X Cambridge conference invited our Internet of Tomatoesteam to feature the prototype technology developed by our lead sponsor, Analog Devices, and become the centerpiece of the event’s Innovation Lab (see two preceding entries in this blog for a description of the project). We turned out to be mobbed all evening, with some of the geeky Cambridge crowd heading straight for the prototype devices and farm data displays, while foodies gravitated toward the new local tomato sauce offered by Heritage Food Truck Catering, or wanted to palm the beautiful heirloom tomatoes displayed by Wards Berry Farm in Sharon. Many were curious to find out what this strange mix of science, agriculture and food was about. And of course, this was the idea …

As the evening progressed, and since tomatoes were in the air, I started thinking of the development of Internet of Things technologies as the equivalent of a ratatouille. Throw some tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, zucchini, squash, onions, and garlic into a large pan with a bit of olive oil, let it simmer for hours, try it, add some herbes de Provence, try again, throw in more stuff, invite a few friends, get them to tell you what’s missing, have them bring those ingredients from their garden, and let them recruit other people excited about coming and sharing in your gastronomical production.

Technology development, like ratatouille, is no longer about creating a recipe in the lab and following a step-by-step process: it’s a series of culinary jam sessions happening over time, as the technology team moves from farm to farm and kitchen to kitchen, and the team fuses new components in reaction to what it learns at each event. Each public session is a performance, and each session acts as a forcing function for the technology development. Marketing people force the technologists to deliver at fixed intervals of time rather than meander as butterflies in the orchard of knowledge, which would be their natural tendency.

In the new co-creation approach, scientists still need to be technically irreproachable and (minimally) rehearsed, but a lot of the technology development happens in real time, with the marketing staff asking the technologists more and more anxiously, as the event gets closer, “whether the demo will be ready in time”. The answer is always yes, and miracles nearly always occur. At TedX, some of the actual fusion occurred on stage in the hour that preceded the beginning of the show (“does this conference offer Internet access?”). The best integrated narrative across farmers, chefs and scientists was developed on the fly, led by questions from visitors.

Watching my two brilliant Analog Devices technology colleagues in action at TedX, I found myself reflecting on how much personal transformation will be required of traditional scientists to move from developer of a traditional cook book recipe to becoming an improv’ artist able to engage others in preparing a large-scale meal where an entire community makes a contribution. This is what an Internet of Things project is like. It involves building a community of interested people adopting a common platform and set of data to change an entire ecosystem. Yes, the same engineering skills and ability to solve complex technical problems are still needed, but IoT scientists also have to develop an interpersonal ability to engage lay people, make the science accessible to them and get them on the collective road to discovery. In a world where scientists are called extroverts when they look at the other scientist’s shoe instead of their own, this represents a considerable challenge…

Being in Cambridge for TedX also reminded me of ratatouille because this is where Julia Child was from and her ratatouille recipe is my favorite (a statement which will undoubtedly cause my French country fellowmen to disown me). The best ratatouilles are inextricably linked to the personalities of their creators, and her infectious enthusiasm still brings a smile to my face whenever I think of her. The same is true for IoT technologies. Most of the fun for the public at TedX was in engaging live with the technologists describing the agony of sending data to the cloud when most farms have no Internet, the farmers describing the anxiety of the potential arrival of late blight, or the chefs waxing eloquent on the challenge of removing water from the pasta sauce when you use New England heirlooms instead of plum tomatoes.

Products are no longer the mysterious output of behind-the-curtain development processes. The technology kitchen is now wide open to the public, and customers want to acknowledge the artistry of scientists, just like they recognize the food artistry of great chefs. In the future, companies will have to become talent agents for their best scientists and market their personalities as an integral part of their value proposition on an equal footing with their products (the scientists and their oeuvre). And the best of them will have to learn to rock on the stages of technology festivals.

Sadly, the tomato season is now over, and I will have to either fly to the Southern Hemisphere or wait until next summer for ratatouille. Or better yet, I’ll talk my scientist colleagues into launching an Internet of Potatoes project to continue jamming together this fall and winter. I’m having too much fun.

It all started on a whim about a year ago. In the day time, I was the very serious manager of a management education and consulting firm that practices co-creation, the art of getting members of complex business ecosystems to work and grow together. At night, I was having fun running a shared kitchen that houses food trucks and food product entrepreneurs in Malden. Nobody knew of my double life, which allowed me to look inordinately sophisticated for a kitchen guy or strangely practical as a consultant.
I blame it all on my friend Steve Whalley, formerly head of sensors at Intel and now Chief Strategy Officer of the MEMS Industry Group. He invited me to give a keynote at the MEMS Executive Congress in Scottsdale, Arizona and suggested I talk about the application of co-creation to the agricultural and food chain. Together, we challenged this august technology group to develop a new way of working together using the latest sensor and Internet of Things technologies. We proposed that they join us in tackling the transformation of the entire Tech-Ag-Food value chain, starting with a specific product (tomatoes) in a particular region (the Boston area).
While we both pretend we’re doing this in the interest of technology, we are mostly motivated by our hope to get access to better-tasting tomatoes. I remind him periodically that the Frenchman that I am has more legitimacy than the Brit that he is when it comes to culinary matters, and we typically settle our argument by agreeing that Italians are better than any of us when it comes to tomatoes. Sadly, this fusion of my two jobs into one has also resulted into brain confusion I still have to recover from.
We became the Three Musketeers when Rob O’Reilly, senior scientist at Analog Devices (ADI), showed up at a breakfast meeting and announced he was spear-heading the development of a technology at ADI that could act as the core platform for our tomato project. Even more importantly, he described his unconventional mode of prototype development as “making up new stuff on the fly live with customers and technology partners, start gathering some data, then try to make sense of it”, which, he agreed, lacked a bit of marketing pizazz. When exposed to the principles of co-creation, he discovered we had been traveling companions, decided we were all on the road to co-creation and Steve, Rob and I have been project buddies ever since.
We’ve been working on two major issues so far: how to help local farmers develop new practices that improve their tomato yield, and how to measure taste in the “finished” tomato, with the goal of eventually connecting the two, i.e., figure out what agricultural practices improve not only yield, but also taste. (With industrial tomatoes, the two issues of productivity and yield are never addressed together, which is why most American tomatoes taste terrible). There is something both surreal and exciting about the dialogue between the analytically-minded ADI scientists (they showed up at the Malden kitchen with equipment worthy of the Rolling Stones) and the (mostly) intuitive farmers or chefs/cooks we are working with (“you just know when your tomato is the right one”). Because some of our chefs have done better than others at the analytical validation game, a new social order appears to be emerging in our kitchen (“I told you your puree was too watery, and the ADI guys proved it with their conductivity meter”).
On Thursday, August 20th, our ADI scientists will be collecting some data at the 31st annual Boston Tomato Contest. Our measurements will not participate in the evaluation of the tomato entries, but will allow us to understand further how taste as measured by taste judges correlates with analytical measurements of specific compounds in the tomato. Welcome to the Internet of Tomatoes!

Who I Am

I am a consultant and teacher who logs hundreds of thousands of air miles each year to share the principles of co-creation worldwide. As the President and Co-founder of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership (ECC Partnership), I work with a roster of global companies to implement co-creative, transformational programs, and processes. The April 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review features an article that I co-authored with Douglas Billings, "Community-Powered Problem Solving" illustrating how a brick and mortar business co-created solutions with their partners and changed the rules of the game. Earlier I co-authored (with Professor Venkat Ramaswamy) the book "The Power of Co-Creation: Build It with Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits" (Simon & Schuster Free Press, October 2010) and the Harvard Business Review article "Building the Co-Creative Enterprise" (October 2010).

WHY I BLOG

Co-creation is about connecting people’s brains. There is a method, a framework that can be taught conceptually and tools that can be implemented inside organizations. But at the heart of it is a personal transformation of people who suddenly see the world through a different lens. Consultants cannot tell those stories because of confidentiality. Academics are too removed from field work to have access to them. As if living at the intersection of these two worlds did not make me schizophrenic enough, I find myself of late developing a third, more humanistic streak: an urge to talk about the profoundly human aspect of co-creation. The stories I share in this blog are those of real people who have touched me in the somewhat random peregrinations of my global consulting and teaching career. Each of them embodies, in one form or other, the co-creation effect.